Activities at ETU

• Advance Courses and Seminar
• Online Education Portal
• Moodle related activities

Advanced Courses and Seminars

In an attempt to transfer the know-how in various areas of e-learning built up over the years, we offer specialized short term corses in e-learning.The courses offered in past include:

• Learning management systems.
• Instruction design.
• Assessment Technologies.
• A seminar for teachers on demystifying e-learning
• Workshop on Moodle – an open source Learning management system

Online Education Portal

The online education portal provides access to various resources on online learning such as articles,papers,books,journals ,organisations,people,standardisation efforts,online corces,faculty development material,etc.As of the portal has over 1000 links.
Url: http://www.cdacmumbai.in/vidyakash/portal

Moodle Related Activities

We have been exploring & working with Moodle (http://moodle.org) in many ways for a few years now: as a platform for our research work on e-learning and localisation, as a base for introducing blended learning in our diploma programme, as a useful open source tool to propagate open source philosophy and now hosting our education portal ( http://education.cdacmumbai.in ). This work is done jointly by the Open Source Software Division (OSSD) & Educational Technology Unit of CDAC Mumbai. Following sections briefly summarize the work done so far on various aspects of Moodle.

Training & Support

As a part of our interest in creating awareness about e-learning and open source tool & based on the expertise gained in various aspects of Moodle, we have conducted number of awareness & training programmes on Moodle and have also supported many organizations to setup Moodle based e-learning platforms.

Awareness Programmes

1. Seminar for teachers on Demystifying E-learning. CDAC Mumbai 2005,06,08 In this series of seminars, Moodle has been used as the primary tool for introducing and demonstrating most aspects of e-learning.
2. Workshop on Moodle CDAC Mumbai, June 2008 The focus of this workshop was on using Moodle to build an effective e-learning setup. It was targeted at teachers from educational organizations with basic computer knowledge.
3. Online learning Tools, Smt Kapila Khandwala College of Education, Mumbai, March 2009 This talk included an introduction to Moodle as a popular open source Learning Management System
4. Customize your Moodle, Pre conference Tutorial in NCOSS, CDAC Mumbai, May 2009 This tutorial was aimed to describe architecture of Moodle, code structure of Moodle and demonstrate different ways to customize Moodle.

Training at external organizations

1. Trained over 250 school teachers across India as part of collaborative initiative of OSSRC- CII-Shiksha [2004-05]
2. Quinnox Ltd, Mumbai, November 2007
3. Veermata Jeejabai Technological Institute (VJTI), Mumbai, June 2009
4. Navinchandra Mehta Institute of Technology & Development – DES, Dadar, Mumbai Campus, August-September 2009
5. SBI Life Insurance, CBD Belapur, October 2009
6. Air India Staff College, Mumbai, December 2009
7. Goa University – Consultancy on use of Moodle to host their PGDCET course content.

Support on Moodle

Our team has provided support/help to a number of organizations to install & set up Moodle & resolve any problems faced during installation/setting up course/customizing Moodle as per requirement. Following is a list of some institutions benefitted by this:

1. Navinchandra Mehta Institute of Technology & Development – DES, Mumbai Campus, August-September 2009
2. SIES College of Management Studies, Nerul
   They have setup their semester courses online using Moodle http://siescomsmoodle.selfip.com
3. SBI Life Insurance
4. Goa University – The PGDCET course portal (http:// www.pgdcet.org) has been setup using Moodle

In-house use of Moodle

1. Moodle was used to conduct the following courses online:
   
   1. Online version of our Post graduate Diploma in Software Technology [PGDST Online] Course
   2. A short term course on Artificial Intelligence (AI) course for SNDT university
   3. Parallel Processing course of our Advanced Post Graduate Diploma in Software Technology course
2. Student Portal of CDAC Mumbai [http://education.cdacmumbai.in]
   Our student portal is hosted using Moodle. The portal is used to complement teaching learning process in our classroom course -> Full time post graduate diploma in software technology (FPGDST). For this portal, we have customized Moodle as per our requirement.

Development Work

We have enhanced the teaching learning experience provided by Moodle by integrating some of our inhouse products and doing relevant extensions to existing functionality of Moodle.

1. Inhouse systems integrated with Moodle
   
   1. Vasistha, An instruction delivery framework
   2. Parikshak, A program grading tool
2. Extensions
   
   1. Collaboration Enhancements in Moodle
      We have enhanced Chat Module and Resource Module and provided additional access facility for Resource in Moodle. In case of Chat Module, we have provided additional teacher's page to make more effective communication between student and teacher. In case of Resource Module, we have provided support for annotations on resources and resources access at Course Category level through this enhancement.
      Refer to corresponding link in “Publications” section for more details.
   2. Extending Moodle Quiz to Support offline Assessments
      We have extended the "Quiz" Activity Module in Moodle to provide support for offline OMR based exams. This extension facilitates creating variants of master question paper in printable format, uploading of configuration & scanned OMR answer data, processing the OMR answer data and seamless integration of the results in existing Moodle "Quiz" features like Item Analysis, Grade Book, etc. Refer to the corresponding link in “Publications” section for more details.
3. Localization
   
   1. Moodle Localization in Hindi [http://www.ossrc.org.in/projects.html]
4. E-shiksha Portal
   [http://www.ossrc.org.in/projects.html]